Finance Minister Miftah Ismail addresses a press conference in Islamabad. Photo courtesy PID
Finance Minister Miftah Ismail on Monday rejected persistent rumors that the revival of a suspended International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout program for Pakistan has been postponed or delayed.
“I have been reading with some amusement all the tweets and stories about IMF program being postponed or delayed due to some anti-corruption law,” he said in a posting on Twitter. “There is no truth to it. The IMF program is on track,” he added, while sharing the link of a report published on the Global Village Space website that had claimed the IMF program was being delayed due to deadlock over the global lender’s demands for “anti-corruption regulations.”
The report had also claimed there was an impasse over some fiscal measures, including further raising gas and electricity prices, adding that the government was willing to implement all the IMF’s demands apart from those related to the National Accountability Bureau.
The IMF inked a $6 billion Extended Fund Facility with Pakistan in June 2019 with a stated aim to support sustainable growth of the national economy and improve standards of living. The program has already disbursed around $3 billion, but was suspended earlier this year after the global lender expressed concerns over an unfunded fuel subsidy that the incumbent government has blamed for bringing the country to the brink of default.
Late last month, Ismail had confirmed that Pakistan had the Memorandum of Economic and Fiscal Policies from the IMF for the combined seventh and eighth reviews. The document is based on the budgetary measures announced in the federal budget for fiscal year 2022-23, which has introduced several new tax measures in a bid to achieve a surplus next year.
According to reports, the IMF believes this would not be possible without surplus budgets from all provincial governments—the budgets presented only have Punjab showing a surplus, while Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa have all envisaged deficit budgets. Under the MEFP, the government must now share a Memorandum of Understanding with the IMF of all provinces adhering to the agreement inked between the lender and the Government of Pakistan. Once the MEFP has been thoroughly debated and terms finalized, the government hopes to receive two tranches of about $918 million each—for the seventh and eighth reviews—by either the end of this month or the start of August.